by Lon Frank
“Oh, I know! I can’t believe he let that little slut answer his phone, I mean, how dumb is that, I guess? But, let the lying dogs sleep, I always say, and good riddance, you know. So, if not The City, then where are we goin’ on this new life of ours?”
Glory always included herself in any plans when it involved anything that sounded exciting or dangerous, but always found a last minute excuse to not go along. Emma noticed that she had already invited herself along this time as well, without even knowing where it might be. She put down the salt shakers she was filling and turned toward her friend with a face of serious resolve.
“Well, you know I’ve been thinkin’, and well, if I’m gonna find life out there, real life, there’s only one place to look. Las Vegas.”
Glory crouched slightly, her mouth open in an exaggerated silent scream, showing her pink tongue, slightly stained with the candy she had been sneaking from the bin of milkshake ingredients.
“Oh, I know! Vegas it is! I mean, we could become showgirls or marry millionaires or anything! Do you think your truck can make it; when do we go; are you taking that pink dress that you were scared to wear to the prom ‘cause it showed your boobs?”
“I told you that’s not why I didn’t wear it, and if I actually had any boobs to show, I’d be so tickled I’d climb up on the giant peach and show ‘em to everybody in town.”
She paused for a minute, then reached over to place her hand on top of Glory’s.
“I talked to Momma last night, and I’m gonna leave tomorrow. She cried, but I think she understands and she even gave me three hundred dollars. I know I don’t have the build to be a showgirl or anything, but I read where they have this school that teaches you to be a dealer in the casinos if you’re good at math. Well, I’m good at math, and the two and two I’ve got around here equals zero. So, I guess I’m going.”
The next morning Emma loaded the old suitcase and two laundry bags full of clothes into the bed of the 1984 Ford pickup she bought from a favorite uncle two years earlier. The air conditioner didn’t work, but the engine was reliable and the tires were good enough to get to Nevada, if she was careful not to run over the jagged bones of road-killed deer which were always a hazard on Texas highways.
She loaded an old sleeping bag, and planned to sleep in the truck bed when the weather allowed it, to save on motel bills. Her mother didn’t like the idea very much, but Emma assured her she would be careful, and stop only in protected campgrounds or parks. She had mapped out a route which included the second night spent in a place she had always been curious about—Big Bend National Park. She said she might as well enjoy her adventure and see a little of the country, but inside, she was already feeling the pangs of homesickness.
As she hugged her mother a final goodbye, and walked towards the driver’s door of the truck, the pangs threatened to become panic and she took a long quivering breath, but did not turn back. As she opened the door, an aging, slightly beat up, street-stripe-yellow Mustang pulled up behind the truck. Glory jumped out, followed by the largest suitcase Emma had ever seen. She wore the horrible, old stained cowboy hat that Emma hated, but tolerated because it was the only thing Glory owned that had been her father’s.
Emma stood like she was in a trance as Glory dropped the tailgate and shoved the huge piece of luggage toward the front of the bed. She blew a kiss to each tearful mother, then turned to her friend and raised her hands, palms up.
“Oh, I know! Are we famous yet?”
* * *
“The Chisos Mountains are like a temperate ‘island’ surrounded by the arid ‘sea’ of vast Chihuahuan Desert...Walk the Lost Mine Trail to see the inhabitants of this interesting community of plants and animals living and dying without interference from humans.”
—Lost Mine Trail brochure, Big Bend Natural History Association
The September sun did not know that summer was officially past, and it still beat down on the Chihuahuan Desert with a fierceness the girls had never experienced. They squatted beside the deserted blacktop, looking at the ragged shreds of what used to be the left rear tire of the old pickup. Glory wore the despised cowboy hat and Emma compensated with a long billed cap with an embroidered marlin on the front and a long flap covering her neck in the back. Emma glanced in both directions of the highway and stood up.
“I thought those tires would be good enough to get us there at least, but it looks like we might as well try to change it, ‘cause I sure don’t see no knight on a white horse coming our way.”
“Oh, I know! We can do it, Emma. I watched Bobby Ray change a flat one time, and if he can do it, well, we can too.”
Both girls wore the shortest shorts and halter tops they could find that morning to combat the heat of the non-air-conditioned truck cab. Now, the tops of Glory’s thighs were already turning a blushing pink.
“Yeah, but it was pro’ly easy for Bobby Ray, what with his eight arms and compound eyes.”
The two friends looked at the ruined tire, then each other, then broke out in laughter. Just then, a blue speck came over the horizon and shimmered in the heat rising from the highway.
“All right, are we hot, or what? There’s our handsome prince now. And just in time, ‘cause you’re turning into one big freckle.”
“Oh, I know! Come stand here, so they will know we’re just two Las Vegas showgirls that need rescuing. Stand up straight and show your gorgeous legs, since I’m like, just a freckle.”
“Okay, stop with the legs already, but somehow, I don’t have a good feeling about this.”
The low-slung, 1979, royal blue Impala slowed to a stop a hundred feet behind the lame pickup. Behind the dark tinted windows and the rear-view mirror hung with a cheap plastic skull with emerald green eyes, lounged two young Chicanos, not much older than the damsels in distress they contemplated. The engine growled a seductive purr through twin chrome tail pipes, and Tejano music blared from the huge speakers mounted behind the rear seat.
Both the driver and his passenger were well known to the sheriff’s deputies in Brewster County. Antonio Rodriguez and Salvador Mendoza each had extensive rap sheets since the time they were twelve. Petty thieves, shoplifters and vandals, they had grown into a young maturity of grand theft auto and aggravated assault. They always managed to slip through the grasp of the public prosecutor, and only spent minimal time behind the steel doors of the county youth detention center. But the lawmen kept an interoffice pool, where ten bucks bought you a square with a designated month and year that the punks would be convicted of something serious enough to win an all expense paid scholarship to the state pen at El Paso.
Tony now took a long hit from the joint that the two muchachos were sharing, and grinned at his friend, showing the broken tooth which was his only legacy from a drunken father. Sally reached for the stub of marijuana and pointed it towards the waiting girls.
“Hey Mucho, it’s our lucky day, huh? And you thought we were too big to play with dollies.”
Tony rolled the car close up behind the girl’s truck, and the two young men stepped out, their smiles as dazzling as the Chihuahuan sun.
* * *
The rock towers stand silent along the highways of men. Watching with faces unchanging through ages, the sentinels of our passing, the witness of our desires. They judge not, but bide and await our blood, our flesh, returning to the dust from which it sprang.
—The road to Big Bend
The girls stumbled often as they were dragged and prodded down the dry ravine. Their hands were tied behind them and each wore a grimy rag fashioned into a blindfold and tied about their heads. Short lengths of rope were also tied around the tender necks of the friends, and they were tugged along like obstinate burros by their two captors.
The gaudy blue Chevy was parked on an abandoned dirt road, deep on the back side of the mountains, away from the casual traffic of tourists and park rangers. The long afternoon shadows stretched out into the desert at the foot of an ancient and craggy mountain that the Ind
ian people still revered, and whispered as they said the name, Quivira.
“Come on, little burro, don’ chu want to be my girlfriend? I want to go for a little ride in the mountains. Don’ chu want to be my pretty burrito?”
Tony pulled viciously on the rope leash around Emma’s neck, causing the girl to stumble to her knees.
“Hey, man, maybe she want to be your chihuahua. She want to seet in your lap and lick your face, maybe.”
Sally always did exactly as Tony, so he too, gave the rope he held a jerk, causing Glory to spill into her friend, and both fell face first onto the sandy floor of the arroyo. Stones the size of walnuts bruised their knees and shoulders - stones that glowed a dull yellow in the twilight. Sally quickly used the noose-rope ends to bind the two girls’ ankles, taking up the slack and tightening the ropes about their necks. He then stood and took a long hit from the bottle of mescal he carried.
“Ah, amigo, they wan’ to be leezards. I forget, what do we do with leezards?”
He stepped over the prostrate body of Glory and forced his hand into the back of her shorts.
“Oh, now I remember, we skeen leezards, and then we leave them for the buzzards to eat.”
Tony reached for the half-empty bottle and kicked Emma savagely in the ribs, making her cringe against the body of her friend lying beside her.
“No, no, my fren’. We skin leezards and then we eat them. “
He gave a coarse laugh at his little joke and held the bottle of mescal close to Glory’s nose, swirling it slightly to animate the white agave worm pickled in the colorless liquor. The filthy nails of his other hand dug into her bottom lip, forcing open her mouth and spilling in some of the fiery liquid.
“Here, little leezard, do you want my worm? Say you want my worm.”
He stood and took another drink from the bottled courage so necessary to his accomplishments of bravado, and wiped his mouth with his open palm. Glory sobbed and pressed her face hard against the other girl’s back, the blood from her lip staining the white fabric. Her voice was that of a little child, almost inaudible in the great silence of Quivira.
“Emmy... Emmy, I’m scared. I’m scared.”
It was the first time in six months that Glory failed to say “Oh, I know!” before her sentence, and the first time since they had been eleven years old that she called her friend “Emmy”.
Sally took a last hit from the bottle and gazed off toward the eastern horizon where a great bloated and golden moon was lifting itself into the cloudless sky above the silent agaves which send up their glorious bloom just once before they die, their seeds scattering on the winds of the desert autumn. In the emptiness below them, a spotted skunk began to hunt for lizards of its own, and a tiny desert shrew screamed in the talons of a Great Horned Owl.
Tony drew a nine-inch hunting knife from a sheath on his belt, the leather studded with stones the color of the emeralds that his Mayan ancestors were slaughtered for. Gulping the last of the mescal, he chewed slowly on the worm from the bottom of the bottle.
“Ah, muchacho, it’s time. See, the moon woman rises early to watch us. We will play with these little chicas, and show them who is master in the mountains.”
But Sally was no longer looking at the moon. His gaze was fixed on the ridge above the ravine and his hand was slowly rising to point at what seemed a very old woman, standing silently like a bent desert tree above them, her face turned to the rocky ground beneath her feet, her hair white as winter snows.
Tony whirled around and gave a startled cry.
“Madre de Dios! Get her, amigo, we must get that old witch and then we finish here.”
The two men rushed off into the shadows below the ridge, Tony going right, Sally running left. The noise of their boots on the loose rocks slowly faded in the ears of the terrified girls. An hour went by, then two hours, and the chill air of the desert night settled on the girls. Huddled together as best they could, they sobbed themselves into a troubled slumber.
Just before dawn, when the moon woman had taken herself into the darkness behind Quivira, a centipede crawled onto Emma’s right cheek. Stirring sleepily, she reached up and brushed the insect away, then sat up and touched the silent body of her friend. Glory came awake instantly, and with a rush of realization, threw her arms about Emma’s neck in a sobbing embrace.
Emma was on her feet in seconds and pulled at her still-clinging friend.
“Shhhh, Glory. Don’t talk. We gotta find our way out of here; I don’t know where they went, but I don’t want to be here when they get back. You okay?”
Glory nodded her head, wiping her tears and licking the dried blood from her lips. Then the two held hands and carefully picked their way down the arroyo. Several times they slipped on the loose yellow stones that rattled in the starlight.
Two days later, a ranger cataloging rare species of cacti, was startled to see the two girls stagger, sunburned and dehydrated, out of one of the thousands of dry canyons in the trackless miles below the peaks known as the Mule Ears. Later in the infirmary of the visitor’s center, the two survivors gave a full account of their abduction and escape to an FBI Agent from the office in Alpine. Emma was telling how they were left tied, then Glory cut them free and they escaped into the lowlands below the mountain. Glory reached over and placed her hand on Emma’s and spoke in a low, hoarse voice.
“Emmy, I didn’t cut us free, you did.”
“No, Glory, you cut me free, I remember you used this little silver knife. It had green stones in the handle. I remember... but you...we, were still asleep. I woke you up, and we were free somehow.”
The two friends were staring at one another in blank wonder. The agent, who was taking notes, put away his pen and stood up.
“Well, you two get some rest now, and we’ll talk again later.”
Just then, a man in the brown uniform of the National Park Service entered. He handed the FBI man a slip of paper and looked curiously at the two girls. The agent slowly folded his glasses and put them in his breast pocket before he spoke.
“Oh, and there’s also this thing about the stone we found in the pocket of your shorts, Miss Augustine. I sent it off to the lab in San Angelo, and they just replied. It seems to consist of gold. Pure... gold.
EPILOGUE
The Rangers towed the blue Impala into the compound where the FBI gave it a thorough search, discovering, among other items, two hundred tablets of Vicodin and sixty tablets of Viagra, stolen two weeks earlier from the Marfa Eckerds pharmacy, a small cigar box of poor-grade marijuana and a paper grocery bag containing two half-used tubes of model cement.
Emma and Glory sold the nugget to Ernie at Ernie’s Desert Museum and Reptile Farm and had money to buy a new set of tires with enough left to pay for two student tuitions at the Las Vegas campus of Fast Eddie’s Gaming Academy.
A search party scoured the area below the Mule Ears for nine days before calling off the search, mostly because nobody cared if the two muchachos were ever found or not. They discovered the trail where the girls were dragged into the broken lands, but they soon lost all trace in the myriad dry ravines and box canyons. No one found the sand, newly stained red as the banners of the Conquistadors, no one found the yellow rocks, pure gold as the Cross of Castille, no one found the two fresh skulls staring with empty eye sockets into the ancient ones of their unknown namesakes. And no one noticed a woman, old as the history of the people, standing like a bent tree on the feet of Quivira, her face forever turned to the earth, her missing eyes watching over the secrets of the mountain.
But on clear star-lit nights, bankers from New Jersey, and farmers from Iowa, and waitresses from any little town anywhere, hug their knees and shiver around high desert campfires when the story is told of the Lost Mine, and the wind moans low and whispers of treasure, and the sorrows of a lost people of the Chisos.
* * *
The Clown Chronicles Copyright © 2010 by Lon Frank. All rights reserved.
No part of this publication ma
y be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any way by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the author except as provided by USA copyright law.
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, descriptions, entities, and incidents included in the story are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, events, and entities is entirely coincidental.
StoneGate Ink 2011
http://www.StoneGateInk.com
Nampa Idaho, 83686
First eBook Edition 2011
Book design copyright Fuji Aamabreorn
Published in the United States of America
StoneHouse Ink/StoneGate Ink
Table of Contents
Title page
Book One - The Circus
- EPILOGUE -
Book Two - The Return
Book Three - The White Shaman
THE SECRET OF THE CHISOS
EPILOGUE
Table of Contents
Title page
Book One - The Circus
- EPILOGUE -
Book Two - The Return
Book Three - The White Shaman
THE SECRET OF THE CHISOS
EPILOGUE
